Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Posted: **Fri Jul 10, 2015 7:22 pm**

Hi

I am not any IT guy as evident here, and I had a similar unfortunate incident today when the Writer file i was working on has turned into all Hashtags!! It was a very important business plan document i was constantly updating and saving it under the name ''KSIDC - NEW'' as a .DOC file when there was a power cut and my laptop with no battery back up, was shut down abruptly. And although i had managed to save the file just a few seconds before the power cut, when after i powered the laptop back and opened the file, it has now turned into all hashtags thereby losing all my weeks of hard work! And that file alone (no other documents has this issue) is now asking permission whenever i tried to open it by opening a new pop up window that says ''ASCII FILTER OPTIONS'' and after i click OK to that a second new pop up window opens saying ''Document is locked for editing by unknown user'' (im the only user), along with ''Open read only'' and ''Open Copy'' buttons in it, with both the options opening only a Hashtag filled document. (i have attached the screenshots)

Now following the detailed instruction that John has thankfully posted here i was fortunately able to locate the Temporary Folder and the File in it ! Thanks a lot for getting me until this stage! However i have been unable to Unzip and find the XML file in it or go any further. Please Help me !!!

I have attached the file here - http://www.mediafire.com/view/1dq4j0v4r ... v3c5e5.tmp

Thanks a lot in advance!
Arun

John_Ha wrote:
When you do find them, unzip them and look for content.XML and open it with a editor capable of "pretty printing" XML (eg Notepad++ with the XML Editor add-on > Plug-ins > XML Tools > Pretty print with line breaks). Notepad opens it, but the XML is just a single line with no line breaks so it is a bit (read a lot!) more difficult to see the data.

If the ODT file has been saved previously, when Writer opens it, Writer creates a copy of it in \Temp.

If a new document is created, then the files in \Temp are empty (0 bytes) until the document is saved. When Writer Autosaves a document which has not been saved with File > Save As ... , and therefore does not have a proper name, Writer AutoSaves it into the backup folder (See Paths - mine is C:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming\OpenOffice\4\user\backup\) as ...\Backup\untitled_0.odt.

One strange thing - this is based on when the user saves in odt format. When I opened a .doc file, I could not see any temporary files in ...\Temp.

This is a picture of some temporary files in ...\Temp\sv166h3z.tmp folder while Writer has a document open. When Writer (AOO?) closes, these tmp files should get deleted.

The attachment temp.png is no longer available

Edit: EDITED to correct errors and add information.

Posted: **Fri Jul 10, 2015 9:47 pm**

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Sadly, quite nothing to do I fear, see: 22 pages term paper replaced with pound signs.

I see that you've already looked for a .tmp file but sadly it's just a pic. It may come from another application. Is there any other similar temporary file that you could try to rename to .doc?
Note that the .doc is a proprietary format, better work in native ODF (.odt), to lower the risk in such case. For any .doc wrecked I doubt there is a single chance to recover anything since it's a binary format.

If you want to help fix this problem, you can also do this survey created for this very problem: Document Recovery Survey.

Posted: **Sat Jul 11, 2015 5:42 am**

Hi thank you so much for looking into it.

I had earlier only posted that specific Temporary file because it had a similar file size (7100 KB) to the original file, when compared to the rest of the Temporary files which are very small. And moreover the ''Time Modified'' of the Temporary File i had chosen and uploaded exactly corresponds with the ''Time Modified'' of the actual file, both of which is ''15.48'', when i had managed to save just 1-2 seconds before the power cut. I have attached Screen shots of these explanations.

But now i have uploaded the Full Folder into Mediafire which has the earlier file too in it, with a total of 6 temporary files:-

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/vicz2a ... rary_Files

And there are still other Temporary Files & Folders in the D:/Users/Arun/AppData/Local/Temp which i can upload too if required, that contains other Folders and Files in it which i am not sure if it corresponds to my damaged file?

But i wonder whether its not possible to correct/rectify this file as i STILL HAVE the ORIGINAL file in its original location, although in Hashtag form ?

Thanks again.
Arun

Posted: **Sat Jul 11, 2015 9:31 pm**

The file which is the odt file is sv2rlax.tmp - the others are images, and the 7MB file is gibberish.

When I open sv2rlax.tmp in 7-Zip, I see the following, but unfortunately, content.xml only has tags - there is no content it it, so none of your text - see below:

: Unzipping sv2rlax.tmp

content.xml

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<office:document-content xmlns:office="http://openoffice.org/2000/office" xmlns:style="http://openoffice.org/2000/style" xmlns:text="http://openoffice.org/2000/text" xmlns:table="http://openoffice.org/2000/table" xmlns:draw="http://openoffice.org/2000/drawing" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:meta="http://openoffice.org/2000/meta" xmlns:number="http://openoffice.org/2000/datastyle" xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:chart="http://openoffice.org/2000/chart" xmlns:dr3d="http://openoffice.org/2000/dr3d" xmlns:math="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:form="http://openoffice.org/2000/form" xmlns:script="http://openoffice.org/2000/script" xmlns:ooo="http://openoffice.org/2004/office" xmlns:ooow="http://openoffice.org/2004/writer" xmlns:oooc="http://openoffice.org/2004/calc" xmlns:dom="http://www.w3.org/2001/xml-events" xmlns:xforms="http://www.w3.org/2002/xforms" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" office:version="1.0" office:class="text">
	<office:script/>
	<office:font-decls>
		<style:font-decl style:name="Arial Unicode MS" fo:font-family="&apos;Arial Unicode MS&apos;" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
		<style:font-decl style:name="HG Mincho Light J" fo:font-family="&apos;HG Mincho Light J&apos;" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
		<style:font-decl style:name="Lucida Sans Unicode" fo:font-family="&apos;Lucida Sans Unicode&apos;" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
		<style:font-decl style:name="Tahoma" fo:font-family="Tahoma" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
		<style:font-decl style:name="Thorndale" fo:font-family="Thorndale" style:font-family-generic="roman" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
		<style:font-decl style:name="Times New Roman" fo:font-family="&apos;Times New Roman&apos;" style:font-family-generic="roman" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
		<style:font-decl style:name="Albany" fo:font-family="Albany" style:font-family-generic="swiss" style:font-pitch="variable"/>
	</office:font-decls>
	<office:automatic-styles/>
	<office:body>
		<office:forms form:automatic-focus="false" form:apply-design-mode="false"/>
		<text:sequence-decls>
			<text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Illustration"/>
			<text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Table"/>
			<text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Text"/>
			<text:sequence-decl text:display-outline-level="0" text:name="Drawing"/>
		</text:sequence-decls>
		<text:p text:style-name="Standard"/>
	</office:body>
</office:document-content>

As you have saved and edited the file many times, you might be lucky and find an even earlier version of the file. Recover as many of the xxxxxx.tmp files as you can, and look at the content.xml files within each. You may still be lucky.

Posted: **Sun Jul 12, 2015 9:11 am**

Hi John, thanks a lot for looking into it.

I had immediately upon reading your earlier post on this topic, saved and backed up the whole Temporary file folder in the path - D:/Users/Arun/AppData/Local/Temp for analysis and i looked into it for finding other tmp files. Although i find various tmp files in it im unable to figure out which one corresponds to the original Writer file. Its all Greek to this Non Geek!! Also please note that i hadnt saved the original file in odt format, but only in .doc format (maybe the contrary couldve been my saving grace!).

Also pardon my ignorance for asking these silly questions - Why isnt the 7 MB file with the similar file size to the Original file and with the exact corresponding time of ''15.48'' (which is when i saved the file just 1 or 2 seconds before the power cut) not the relevant one? And also then, what does it have in it for 7 MB? I was strongly thinking that this 7 MB temporary file is the related file because of these 3 reasons:-
1) Same ''Time Modified'' - 15.48
2) Closely similar file size - 7 MB
3) It has the same Photo image which is the Front cover of the original file.

The full Temporary Folder soon after this incident has been saved and now uploaded here:-

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/62oz0r ... ile_Folder

Please have a look to see if there is any hope for retrieving it.

Thanks a lot again!

John_Ha wrote:The file which is the odt file is sv2rlax.tmp - the others are images, and the 7MB file is gibberish.

When I open sv2rlax.tmp in 7-Zip, I see the following, but unfortunately, content.xml only has tags - there is no content it it, so none of your text - see below:

As you have saved and edited the file many times, you might be lucky and find an even earlier version of the file. Recover as many of the xxxxxx.tmp files as you can, and look at the content.xml files within each. You may still be lucky.

Posted: **Sun Jul 12, 2015 9:49 am**

Arun.Silver wrote:I had immediately upon reading your earlier post on this topic, saved and backed up the whole Temporary file folder in the path - D:/Users/Arun/AppData/Local/Temp for analysis and i looked into it for finding other tmp files.

That keeps all the files which have not yet been deleted. Don't forget, you need also to use Recuva to look for deleted files which are no longer in that folder - there should be many of them. Go though all the deleted files, most recent first, un-deleting them until you find a usable one.

Arun.Silver wrote:Why isnt the 7 MB file with the similar file size to the Original file and with the exact corresponding time of ''15.48'' (which is when i saved the file just 1 or 2 seconds before the power cut) not the relevant one?

I don't know not least because I do not know how AOO writes to the disk - like you, I am a user, not a developer. It could be that Writer reserved the space on the disk to write the contents but then crashed before the contents were written, so this is the previous contents of that area of the disk.

After writing the above, I went back and looked more closely at the file. As far as an odt is concerned, the first half is gibberish, and the second half is all nulls. But the start of the file is as below, where it mentions Exif and Adobe Photoshop which suggests it is an image. In hindsight, I should have spotted the first characters which say that is actually a JPG image. I opened it with an image editor and you can see that the PC crashed as it was writing this JPG Image - it wrote the first half and then stopped suddenly.

The actual image - rename the file to a JPG and open it - is as below. Note that the image is 2828 wide x 4000 pixels high x 24 bit colour (so each pixel needs 3 bytes). The uncompressed image is therefore ~36 MB and the compressed JPG is 7 MB. This is a VERY large image. Recall that if you are printing at 150dpi, and the image will be 4 inches wide, it will only print at 150 x 4 = 600 pixels wide so there is no point in having it with any more pixels. Also, you should always insert JPG images by Insert > Picture > From file and NEVER by pasting because if you paste them, they get saved as PNG images which are usually much - 3x - bigger than the equivalent JPG.

Arun.Silver wrote:Please have a look to see if there is any hope for retrieving it.

I will do later this morning - I first have a 10 mile run to do. But you are posting the contents of the .../Temp folder and there is only a slim chance that the temporary file will be there. Remember that the last time you saved the file properly, Writer deleted the temporary file properly. You need to use Recuva to see if you can find and un-delete that file, or the last but one file, etc. I think that is your best chance of finding it.

Posted: **Sun Jul 12, 2015 10:37 am**

It's raining, so I have looked at the contents of the temporary folder you posted and there is nothing useful in it. shortformbioscorrupt.odt is full of #.

You can check yourself. Try to download each file in turn. Some are immediately shown to you as images. Others - such as the AV ... files, when downloaded and opened with NotePad ++ show junk.

If you want to recover your file contents you are going to have to cross your fingers for luck, and look for deleted versions of its temporary files, and un-delete them. Remember that the last time you saved the file properly, Writer deleted the temporary file in .../Temp properly. You need to use Recuva and go to .../Temp on your C: drive, and see if you can find and un-delete any Writer files. You are looking for deleted files of the form sv166XXX.tmp in a deleted folder of the form sv166h3z, where the first 5 characters are the same for both folder and file. When you find them, open them with a Zip utility, or Notepad++ to identify what they are.

Re-read my Using RECUVA to un-delete Writer temporary files which are now deleted andAnother on RECUVA

I think that is your best chance of finding it.

When I get some free time, I will re-write my posts as a tutorial with explicit examples.

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